News Archive - November 2012

ESnet (Energy Sciences Network) has deployed three anonymous read-only GridFTP servers for testing purposes. These GridFTP servers are available as endpoints on Globus Online: esnet#anl-diskpt1, esnet#bnl-diskpt1 and esnet#lbl-diskpt1. Globus Online users can use these endpoints for testing purposes. Since these endpoints allow anonymous access, you do not need a username and password to access them. It should be noted that you can only read data from these endpoints and not write data to them.

Earlier this week at the SC12 conference we announced a set of new services that we plan to launch early in 2013, including a simple, fast way to share big data directly from your own storage (without moving it to a cloud storage provider). We also announced that some of these future services will have a monthly fee associated with them, in keeping with our objective to make Globus Online a self-sustaining effort. We've received positive feedback on our development plans, as well as many questions, and I'd like to further expand on our announcement.

Our mission is to serve the data management needs of researchers at academic and non-profit institutions. In order for us to do this effectively, we must be able to sustain our operations—a task that is not easy to do within the traditional research funding environment. Federal agencies continue to support our core research through grants, but these grants are not intended to fund operating costs for things like cloud hosting resources, user support staff, and helpdesk software, among others. Our goal is to charge a modest fee to those researchers and projects who receive substantial value from our service, not so that we can make money, but so that we can sustain Globus Online over the long term.

I am pleased to announce that the user of the month for October 2012 is Dmitry Ozerov from DESY in Germany.

Dmitry has a background in particle physics research and is currently working as an IT data management specialist in the Scientific Data Management and Grid Computing team at DESY, Hamburg. The team manages 7.5 petabytes of disk and 4 petabytes of tape storage, and the batch facility for the scientists from the High Energy Physics and Photon Science.